The 12th Statistical Machine Learning Seminar (2013.7.11)

Date/time: July 11th (Thu) 15:00-17:00
Place: Seminar Room 5 (3F, D313),
Institute of Statistical Mathematics (Tachikawa, Tokyo)

http://www.ism.ac.jp/access/index_e.html

Speaker 1
Vincent Q. Vu
(Dept. Statistics, Ohio State University)

http://www.vince.vu/

Title: Sparse Principal Components and Subspaces:
Concepts, Theory, and Algorithms
Abstract:
Principal components analysis (PCA) is a popular technique for
unsupervised dimension reduction that has a wide range of application
in science, engineering, and any place where multivariate data is
abundant. Its main idea is to look for linear combinations of the
variables with the largest variance. These linear combinations
correspond to eigenvectors of a covariance matrix. However, in
modern applications where the number of variables can be much
larger than the number of samples, PCA suffers from two major
weaknesses: 1) the interpretability and subsequent use of the
principal directions is hindered by their dependence on all of the
variables; 2) it is generally inconsistent in high-dimensions, i.e.
the estimated principal directions can be noisy and unreliable.
This has motivated much research over the past decade into a
class of techniques called sparse PCA that combine the essence of
PCA with the assumption that the phenomena of interest depend
mostly on a few variables.
In this talk, I will present some recent theoretical results on
sparse PCA including optimal minimax bounds for estimating the
principal eigenvector and optimal minimax bounds for
estimating the principal subspace spanned by the eigenvectors of a
general covariance matrix. The optimal estimators turn out to be
NP-hard to compute. However, I will also present a very recent
result that shows that a convex relaxation, due to
d’Aspremont et al. (2007), is a near-optimal estimator of the
principal eigenvector under very general conditions.

Speaker 2:
Mauricio Alvarez
(Dept. Electrical Engineering, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira,
Columbia)

https://sites.google.com/site/maalvarezl/

Title: Multi-output Gaussian Processes.
Abstract:
In this talk, we will review the problem of modeling correlated outputs
using Gaussian process priors. Applications of modeling correlated outputs
include the joint prediction of pollutant metals in geostatistics, and
multitask learning in machine learning. Defining a Gaussian process prior
for correlated outputs translates into specifying a suitable covariance
function that captures dependencies between the different output variables.
Classical models for obtaining such a covariance function include the linear
model of coregionalization and process convolutions. We describe a general
framework for developing multiple output covariance functions by performing
convolutions between smoothing kernels particular to each output and
covariance functions that are common to all outputs. Both the linear model
of coregionalization and the process convolutions turn out to be special
cases of this framework. Practical aspects of the methodology involve the
use of domain-specific knowledge for defining relevant smoothing kernels,
efficient approximations for reducing computational complexity and a method
for establishing a general class of nonstationary covariances with
applications in robotics and motion capture data.